


Everything you swallow

by GlitchCritter



Series: persona non grata [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Death of parent (pre-story), Gen, My OC - Freeform, Short Story, tw: the upper class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:53:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25368694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlitchCritter/pseuds/GlitchCritter
Summary: But you know what? Screw your sister, screw your mother, screw everyone else with their blood forced inside of you, because it has been six weeks since your father died and it feels like you haven’t gotten more than an hour of sleep.
Series: persona non grata [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1837216





	Everything you swallow

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a game by Porpentine Charity Heartscape. Just a first story to share with the world.

It’s been six weeks and she’s still crying, wandering the gaping halls and calling his name, as if it means anything anymore. Your sibling jostles in her stomach. You imagine their fatigued, half-grown eyes drooping as they are kept awake by her movement, the alcohol in your mother’s stomach trickling through their umbilical. An IV transporting life and death until they cancel each other out. The science fiction films that turn to fuzz on your screen show deformed creatures with faces made of putty and horsehair, and you imagine them having such a visage as they are cut out of your mother’s stomach, one so gruesome she faints on the spot.

But you know what? Screw your sister, screw your mother, screw everyone else with their blood forced inside of you, because it has been six weeks and it feels like you haven’t gotten more than an hour of sleep. 

God, how could you think something so cruel? Feel the guilt immediately surge in pinpricks and jolts. A stone sinking into the bottom of your stomach, weighing down every movement. It’s your fault for not being strong enough to move on. You’re supposed to move on. What do you owe him, anyways? For the bruises and the occasional split lip, for the screaming and the nightmares and everything else that etches itself into your bone marrow. Everything he covered in a bandage of Benjamins, dollars ground into a salve he slathered on without ever actually stopping your bleeding. 

You owe him so, so much.  
Another stone.

Remember your mother screaming over him, demanding the doctors to do something, anything, trying to bribe them of all things, as if somehow their greed could produce a direct line to the Angel of Death. Remember his soft, firm voice as he pleaded for them to stop fussing. Begging them to let him die.

Your mother nears your room again and lets out a sonorous moan. You want to rip out her voice box, leave her wriggling and bleeding out on the waxed oak floor. 

Turn on the light. It doesn’t matter, she knows you’re awake. Rifle through the closet, tear past stained clothes and molding books and broken toys and an old bottle of chocolate syrup and everything else you have deliberately destroyed, because God knows you gave your father enough stress over the years, that bastard probably looked from the heavens and saw you screaming that you hated your father, hated your whole life in this disgusting house, and wished he’d just leave and never hurt anyone ever again, and decided that was the perfect time to give him a heart attack. Except you sit under glass windows every Saturday and there’s nobody there but a babbling rabbi and your tiny body staring at the ceiling lights. 

There are too many stones, too many reasons you can never be forgiven, they overflow, hurtling out of your mouth and cracking your teeth, you spit up blood and granite and the knowledge that you need to swallow it all back up again, choke the shards down with chocolate milk, or the maid will see.

Your closet is ravaged and you finally find an aluminum bat from the six months you spent in baseball before you got a concussion. It’s still big enough. Got a heft to it. Juggle it between your hands. Make a few mock strikes. Turn off the light. 

A long time ago you figured out how to walk in the hall without making a sound. Now you let yourself echo, marching in time with your rampaging heart beat, clutching your new weapon. You avoid the routes your mother takes, but you know she can hear you. That does not mean she will stop, and ask what you are doing, and tell you to go to bed. You are simply another satellite in her orbit. 

Are you a guardian? An aggressor? Just protecting yourself? Your hands shake, and you stop them. Your body is so, so heavy. Maybe this is your parting gift, not given by God or some spirit but the big man himself, left preemptively like the echo of a handprint that has squished itself down into your skull.

In a few hours, light curls through the bottom of the door frames, and whatever spell you were under ends. Your stop roaming the halls, body past the point of fatigue, bursting with adrenaline. It is the first time in years you have felt correct. Your aching legs ride your bike to school, the handlebars holding you up as some god of perpetual motion forces you forward. 

The next few months are cramming with these semi-waking wanderings, your stiff marching and your mother’s rambling pace treading the floorboards like clockwork, never getting close enough to necessitate interaction. Until it’s summer, and you never stay at home at night, and no one has to clean up the stones when you vomit. 

When they come to your funeral, no one will know this story. But they will put rocks on your grave, whether you want them to or not, and they will not know what they really mean.


End file.
